Sunday, March 5, 2017

Details: While the first two sculptures we featured from this year's Toy Fair were out in the lobby of the convention center, there was more to see at the actual LEGO booth. Sculptures of Supergirl and Harley Quinn as they appear in the DC Superhero Girls line made an appearance (with a similar photo opportunity background) in one of the front corners of the booth. As is par for the course, there are many exciting details here - don't miss Supergirl's shoes (detailedasymmetrically), necklace, chest emblem and bracelet or Harley Quinn's mask, buttons, and hammer. One thing that caught my eye is the extensive use of plates to keep the appearance of the sculpture very high-resolution - frequently, on a sculpture this size, you'll see plates skipped in favor of trying to get the shape right using only bricks. Here, they didn't spare that effort or expense. The result pays off, making the figures look very realistic on the whole. The faces also include some additional detail.

Check out this close-up of Harley Quinn's face. Note how half-stud offsets are used extensively, the nose comes to a 1-stud-wide point, and the curvature in the lips incorporates studs-not-on-top techniques. They're small details, and they really help sell the model. Her right hand similarly makes for a study in technique (although I'd say it's less successful) - you can see the shape that the hand should take up filled with plates and bricks, but the fingers seem less distinctive. Unused space and minor changes in contour suggest the shape, and your mind fills in the rest. It's a technique that works because people who don't write blogs like this will never look at it closely enough for the illusion of a hand to dissolve.

Getting back to Supergirl, there are some clever techniques in her face as well - perhaps the first surprise is that it's not the same shape as Harley Quinn's, but a completely different build. A close-up of her lips shows jumper plates used for shaping, with some of them simply having shadows above them to suggest depth. Moving up towards her eyes, you can see that her nose is two studs wide, and that another sideways section makes up the nose-adjacent part of the eyes and eyebrows.

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